CAB Direct via Google - FAQs
What is CABI doing in partnership with Google and Semantico?
CABI has worked with its technology partner Semantico to release 1.5 million of the 9 million records in CAB Direct to Google. The data selected spans every decade from 1910 onwards, and is restricted so that a single user coming from a Google search can preview up to 4 abstracts on the database.
Why has CABI decided to take this action?
Our own research into user behaviour has shown that end users are using Google as their search engine of choice, regardless of the resources that are already available through their library. We did this as we wanted to drive more traffic to the database and make CAB Direct more accessible to end users. A secondary reason is to gain greater exposure for our databases through wider usage on the free Web.
What it means for subscribers to CAB Direct
If the user enters CAB Direct and has an IP address that is recognised as a subscriber by our systems, they will automatically get a message to say that they have subscribed to this platform and will be given access to all the content available for their CAB Direct subscription.
So can subscribers cancel and still use CAB Abstracts?
They could but their access would be severely limited. If an institution chooses to cancel its subscription the end users would be limited to just 4 records per day from a subset of just 1.5 million records from the total CAB Direct database of 6.2 million CAB Abstracts records.
What about Global Health records?
There are over 280,000 records from Global Health that can be accessed via the Google 4 abstract access model. This is only 16% of the total 1.7 million abstracts available through the CAB Direct platform.
What it means for subscribers to our products from non-CABI platforms
If a user accesses CAB Abstracts via another platform (Ovid, WoK, EBSCO, etc.) they will still see only 4 records from a Google search of CABI's data. To see more records, they should search via their own subscription platform.
